Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff to Blow your mind from how Stuff
Speaker 1: Works dot com. Hey, wasn't the stuff to blow your
Speaker 1: my My My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Julie Douglas.
Speaker 1: Would do what your preferred method of greeting, Uh, just
Speaker 1: a big bear hug, you know, the twenty second hug,
Speaker 1: counting it down slowly and maxuriously right into the person's ear.
Speaker 1: Let's see, that's that's a very personal mode of of greeting.
Speaker 1: You know. Some people prefer the handshake, which I was
Speaker 1: I was reading just a few minutes ago about how
Speaker 1: there's this theory that the handshake evolves from a day
Speaker 1: when you had to prove that you didn't have a
Speaker 1: weapon in your hand. It seems a little outdated and
Speaker 1: it's wrought with complications anyway, hand pressure, hand, a texture
Speaker 1: of your hand, all that. Um Me, I'm getting more
Speaker 1: and more on this fist bump badwagon. Oh yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: I know, there's it has this kind of like a
Speaker 1: brow stigma apparently, which I was knowing not I'm aware of,
Speaker 1: but I mean, you have limited contact with the other person,
Speaker 1: which is especially great with like if I'm interacting with
Speaker 1: my sister, who's even more standoffice than I am. It's
Speaker 1: like the only way that we can like physically acknowledge
Speaker 1: each other because like hugs are out, handshakes are out,
Speaker 1: but the fist bump works and that's like only like
Speaker 1: the corner knuckles, right, Like you guys don't even do
Speaker 1: four knuckles. No, no, no, you can just I mean,
Speaker 1: you know what way you can almost kind of have
Speaker 1: like a you know, just a slightest touch and it
Speaker 1: does the job. Grazing, grazing, a grazing, close fisted high five.
Speaker 1: Is it sometimes called? Okay? Well, this may be a
Speaker 1: really good microbial strategy because, as we know from other
Speaker 1: podcasts and according to Stanford microbiologists Stanley Falcow, the world
Speaker 1: is covered in a fine patina of feces. Yes, And
Speaker 1: I think about this every time that I get to
Speaker 1: this particular restaurant and there's a bowl of candy there,
Speaker 1: and my daughter always reaches for it, and I always
Speaker 1: kind of corral her away from it, because I think, no,
Speaker 1: the batilla of pieces is covering at least a couple
Speaker 1: of pieces of those candy, and if she ingests that,
Speaker 1: surely the next day will be seeing diarrhea. Well yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean it's it's I think a certain level of
Speaker 1: fear regarding the bacterial world around us is is sensible. Uh,
Speaker 1: And that's why you know, you get into this area
Speaker 1: of the fist pone, this concern over the fist pond
Speaker 1: being possibly a better means of greeting ban that fully
Speaker 1: bear hug. Yeah, because think about it right now, you're
Speaker 1: marinating in about a hundred truly in microbial cells from
Speaker 1: head to foot and mouth gut on your skin. That
Speaker 1: stuff gets around, and as we had discussed in our
Speaker 1: roller Derby microbiome, when you come into contact with people,
Speaker 1: it's very easy to transfer your microbial colony to another person.
Speaker 1: In fact, we saw that with those roller Derby teams
Speaker 1: that after matches they would swab the skin and find
Speaker 1: that one team's microbiotic which was the same by the way,
Speaker 1: because they shared a similar profile of microbiome, would begin
Speaker 1: to try to colonize the other ones. So you really
Speaker 1: do have to be defensive about the microbes in the world. Yeah,
Speaker 1: they're good microbes out there, they're bad microbes out there,
Speaker 1: But this is the community move you've built, and we're
Speaker 1: understandably a little xenophobic about other people's microbial communities merging
Speaker 1: with our own, because it can lead to all sorts
Speaker 1: of complications. Well, especially when you begin to wonder whether
Speaker 1: or not we're entering into a post antibiotic era. Yes,
Speaker 1: because for the longest you've had your antibiterial soap, like
Speaker 1: you know, big vats of it, big clear just columns
Speaker 1: of it with a giant pump on top. Right, and
Speaker 1: and and I've been guilty of this as well. At
Speaker 1: the slightest excuse, be it dirt or you just you
Speaker 1: just think of something a little dirty, You head over there,
Speaker 1: get like two squirts of the pump and just completely
Speaker 1: lathered down your hands, and you feel better and supposedly
Speaker 1: you're you're cleaner well. And then of course you see
Speaker 1: this in a hospital setting at large, right, because you
Speaker 1: have to make sure that your surfaces are clean, that
Speaker 1: your skin is clean. And by the way, there's a
Speaker 1: lot of microbes in hospitals and they become antibacterial resistant,
Speaker 1: which is where we are today. But let me before
Speaker 1: we jump to that, I just wanted to mentioned that
Speaker 1: Hazel Barton, she's a professor of microbiology and geology at
Speaker 1: the University of Ankron in Ohio. She has a really
Speaker 1: good article on Slate about this, and she talks about antibiotics,
Speaker 1: and she says their chemical keys. They're constructed to mimic
Speaker 1: seingular patterns to block, bind, and even collapse critical structures
Speaker 1: within the microbial cell. They do amazing things. They're really specific.
Speaker 1: They can kill one bacterial cell in a sea of
Speaker 1: human cells, and she calls it a magic bullet. But
Speaker 1: she says that they are much more complex than anti
Speaker 1: cancer or anti viral drugs, and their complex structural nature
Speaker 1: and high specificity make them almost impossible for chemists to
Speaker 1: build from scratch or even synthesize, and that we rely
Speaker 1: on nature to design these molecules for us, and the
Speaker 1: majority of these antibiotics come from other microbes. So she
Speaker 1: makes this case of saying that they have novel, unique
Speaker 1: structures and we are at a place where we really
Speaker 1: exploited a lot of resources here. Yeah, that's one of
Speaker 1: the things that that can be really mind blowing about this,
Speaker 1: and can be a kind of a startling and frightening revelation,
Speaker 1: is that any any bacterial agents out there are an
Speaker 1: exhaustible resource. What have we done. We've gone in the
Speaker 1: natural world, like you said, we've gone underground, and we've
Speaker 1: we've we've looked at things in the soil, all right,
Speaker 1: what this can be used to fight a bacterial infection?
Speaker 1: This can be used and then eventually we've we've drafted
Speaker 1: everyone into the war against bacteria. So we have to
Speaker 1: go to increasingly more exotic locations to try and find
Speaker 1: those new keys to UH to unlock and unravel our
Speaker 1: bacterial adversaries. That's a good way to put it, because meantime,
Speaker 1: in the meantime, you know, the clock is ticking, and
Speaker 1: we have all these antibacterial resistant microbes emerging. And we
Speaker 1: see this with MERSA and that it's actually named sequentially
Speaker 1: after the antibiotics. It's resistant too, and we see that
Speaker 1: it's responsible for thousands of deaths annually. This is, of course,
Speaker 1: methoslin resistant Stephococcus arius, right, And then you have other names,
Speaker 1: less familiar emerging. We have carpet Penham resistant enter A
Speaker 1: size c R E. We have van Kommassen resistant enter
Speaker 1: a caucus v R E. And closter Ridium deficially we've
Speaker 1: seen that before, we talked about it. See diff no
Speaker 1: one on the street. So all of these things are
Speaker 1: emerging and in the meantime, you have this exhausted potential
Speaker 1: market forces for for new drugs. Right. In fact, Barton
Speaker 1: makes the point that the last novel novel drug that
Speaker 1: came to the market was discovered in and it took
Speaker 1: nearly twenty years to enter the marketplace as something called
Speaker 1: cubasin and then which we discovered on the side of
Speaker 1: a volcano. I know, it's not that amazing. That was
Speaker 1: another one we had to go where we've drafted everyone
Speaker 1: in the immediate vicinity, where are these soldiers that we
Speaker 1: haven't found yet? And that was one. Yeah. Another one
Speaker 1: was anthrosamysin, which could be effective against MERSA and anthrax,
Speaker 1: and that was actually found in deep ocean sediments. So
Speaker 1: you can see again that clock ticking and you know,
Speaker 1: trying to find new drugs to conquer this while the
Speaker 1: more other microbes are getting stronger and stronger and more
Speaker 1: and more resistant. In fact, in March of this year,
Speaker 1: Dame Sally Davies, she's the u K's Chief Medical offers
Speaker 1: she said, hey, microbial antibiotic resistance is a threat that's
Speaker 1: on par with global warming and terrorist attacks. Let's take
Speaker 1: this really seriously. Yeah, because just look at Merca whereas
Speaker 1: MERCAS showing up showing up in hospitals like the place
Speaker 1: you don't want really dangerous anti bacterial resistant um agent
Speaker 1: to show up because you have all the people in
Speaker 1: weakened states or immune systems are weakened. And uh, in
Speaker 1: two thousand five, almost ten percent of hospital door handles
Speaker 1: were shown to contain MERCA. So and and that's not
Speaker 1: even getting into the whole handwashing situation that has been
Speaker 1: a problem in many hospitals, you know, but the whole
Speaker 1: situation with doctors surgeons not washing their hands um, which
Speaker 1: is again a whole another issue. But but we'll get
Speaker 1: to that. We'll get to that, of course. Uh. In
Speaker 1: the meantime, just kind of have to look and see
Speaker 1: what we can do right now. Now, Barton says, Hey,
Speaker 1: since we have to go to these more remote locations,
Speaker 1: let's begin to consider caves as a possible area of
Speaker 1: exploration for these microbes, because she says, they're extreme environments,
Speaker 1: they lack sunlight, they have scant resources, and it makes
Speaker 1: an ideal place to hunt for antibiots since microbes have
Speaker 1: to be particularly hardy in order to survive. Yeah, I'd
Speaker 1: like to use the drafting analogy this is the equalency
Speaker 1: of of just heading out into the absolute boondocks and
Speaker 1: finding like the Family of Hillbillies and saying, hey, here's
Speaker 1: some able a whole bunch of able bodied boys here
Speaker 1: work in the farm. You guys can come and fight
Speaker 1: the fight, but you have to really go far. And
Speaker 1: like like you said, this is we're almos talking about
Speaker 1: an alien environment, just one that's kind of entombed within
Speaker 1: our own. We you see really exotic forms of life
Speaker 1: at the visible level and then also at the macrobile
Speaker 1: level as well. Yeah, and what I love about this
Speaker 1: is that you can just amount and all these microbiologists
Speaker 1: bull lunking into these caves and coming up with these samples,
Speaker 1: and they're screening the genetic code of thousands of these
Speaker 1: micro organisms for novelty. Again, that's that novel compound that
Speaker 1: they're looking for. And then what they do is they
Speaker 1: take that and they give it to analytical chemists and
Speaker 1: they use technologies like liquid chromatography mass spectromedy and ion
Speaker 1: mobility mass spectromeddy and that hones in on that novel
Speaker 1: and unusual compounds. So we have the means of finding it,
Speaker 1: and we have the technology. It's just again racing against
Speaker 1: that clock. Yeah, and the possibility is really encouraging. Uh.
Speaker 1: It's reading that just one bacterium from one of these
Speaker 1: isolated cave systems could be found to have some upwards
Speaker 1: like thirty eight antibacterial compounds within. So so the payoff
Speaker 1: is pretty crazy, the payoff potentially. Yeah. All right, we're
Speaker 1: gonna take a quick break and we come back more
Speaker 1: about the war against the bacteria and we'll get back
Speaker 1: to the fist punk a little bit. Yeah. Alright, so
Speaker 1: we're back and we are talking about this microbial world
Speaker 1: that we dwell in and how to better negotiate our
Speaker 1: way through it, especially when you consider the antibacterial resistance
Speaker 1: stuff out there. So what do we do we change
Speaker 1: our behavior? Right? Yeah, yeah, I mean if you can't,
Speaker 1: if you can't make the big advances against the enemy,
Speaker 1: you try accumulate all the small advances you can make.
Speaker 1: I mean that's how wars are one anyway, right, just
Speaker 1: you build up all the little petty advantages. And one
Speaker 1: petty advantage. Uh. The argument is to be made is
Speaker 1: to start relying more on that fis bump as opposed
Speaker 1: to that handshake, especially in a hospital environment. That's what
Speaker 1: you're saying, is I need to ease off of the
Speaker 1: hot breath hugs. Yeah, and do something that's perhaps not
Speaker 1: quite as skin to skin contact. Fine, right, well, now
Speaker 1: the studying question. Didn't we look at the hugs because again,
Speaker 1: the hospital environment where generally people knowing off that you know,
Speaker 1: you're not gonna have a big, giant, you know, stereotypical
Speaker 1: Russian hug every time you encounter somebody. But this particular
Speaker 1: research was publishing two thales and thirteen by the Journal
Speaker 1: of Hospital Infection. Surgeons at West Virginia University, UH decided
Speaker 1: they were going to see if they could reduce the
Speaker 1: spread of infection just by fist bumping instead of shaking hands.
Speaker 1: The lead researcher on this was Tom of Cleveland, and
Speaker 1: he's a West Virginia plastic surgeon, and uh it was
Speaker 1: a really a small statement, but remarkable in their findings. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and we'll get to that in a second. But let's
Speaker 1: back up and look at why this is important. First
Speaker 1: of all, even if your doctor is washing his or
Speaker 1: her hands, or you run and wash your hands soon
Speaker 1: after you clasp hands with another person, eighty percent of
Speaker 1: individuals retained some disease causing bacteria after washing. Okay, most
Speaker 1: people are doing it wrong, right. I mean, that's the
Speaker 1: whole adage that when you wash your hands you should
Speaker 1: do the ABC song twice through, and most people don't
Speaker 1: do that. I mean most of the time when I
Speaker 1: go to the bathroom, I don't even hear anybody singing. Now,
Speaker 1: physicians are probably a little better about this, right, because
Speaker 1: they're more aware of it. Um. But here's the thing.
Speaker 1: They kind of have to have some sort of interaction
Speaker 1: with you, physicians, right, because if you think about it,
Speaker 1: if you are going to see a medical professional, you're
Speaker 1: probably there in what is usually a tense situation or
Speaker 1: stressful situation. You don't usually go to the doctor when
Speaker 1: you're feeling great, right, So this can be a situation
Speaker 1: where you have to have that that sort of touchy
Speaker 1: feeling moment to create a sense of trust between the
Speaker 1: doctor and the patient. So this is why the doctor
Speaker 1: always engages you in a handshake. Right. Might seem sort
Speaker 1: of ridiculous because this is what I think every time
Speaker 1: my doctor reaches out of her hand, like please, don't
Speaker 1: I know if you've been doing this to people all
Speaker 1: day long who are sick. But again, it is that
Speaker 1: social contract. So yeah, you want your surgeon, your doctor, whoever.
Speaker 1: You want some sort of human connection so that you
Speaker 1: don't feel like a piece of meat, you don't feel
Speaker 1: like a number. You want them to. You want to
Speaker 1: at least there to be an illusion that they care
Speaker 1: about your life. So this is why those surgeons thought, Okay,
Speaker 1: this is a very important thing here. This is not
Speaker 1: just hey, let's sit around and fist bump each other
Speaker 1: and and just grow out all day. Let's actually see
Speaker 1: if we can reduce the amount of junk that gets
Speaker 1: spread around. And this is how it went down. So
Speaker 1: small group again, they just started doing the fist bumps
Speaker 1: instead of the shaking. Now they cultured the bacteria grown
Speaker 1: on their hands, and they found that the handshake exposed
Speaker 1: more than three times as much skin surface area as
Speaker 1: the fist bump, and the contact average two point two
Speaker 1: point seven times longer, so more bacteria was transmitted as
Speaker 1: expected with the handshake versus the fist pump, where you
Speaker 1: have just you know, very small amount of skin. I mean,
Speaker 1: they're not even if you if you take your your
Speaker 1: fists and sort of bump them, you'll see that they're
Speaker 1: they're they're not made to interlock. It's not like the handshake,
Speaker 1: which is kind of like the mating of two fleshy squids.
Speaker 1: Fleshy squid slushy squids of course, not too squid of
Speaker 1: the same species, the two different species squid. That's why
Speaker 1: I want squids. Well, I like this because I'm not
Speaker 1: a big handshake person anyway, Like I said, I'd rather
Speaker 1: hug um. And I do find it awkward sometimes because
Speaker 1: you know, you don't know whether or not to employ
Speaker 1: the super aggressive shake or the you don't want to
Speaker 1: do like a limp fish shake either. You also, you
Speaker 1: can have different galvanic skin responses, right, so there's more
Speaker 1: sweat on your hands sometimes than others. It can be
Speaker 1: uh odd, especially when you find yourself with with cold
Speaker 1: dead hands like me, and you have to apologize every
Speaker 1: time you go to shake someone's hand. Well, one thing
Speaker 1: they pointed out in the study too, is that the
Speaker 1: social contract of it is beautiful because all right, so
Speaker 1: let's say you're you're on a no shaking hands roll,
Speaker 1: like that's your goal for the day. Then what do
Speaker 1: you do when somebody extends to hand If you say, oh,
Speaker 1: I'm sorry, I can't shake hands today, or I'm not
Speaker 1: gonna you know, how do you politely get out of that.
Speaker 1: You're gonna on some level feel or or look like
Speaker 1: a jerk that you're gonna be dead in the water
Speaker 1: if you don't have some sort of response. Right, But
Speaker 1: if they extend that hand for the shake and then
Speaker 1: you respond by extending that hand for the fist bump wall,
Speaker 1: all they have to do is just curl that's squid
Speaker 1: up into a fist and bam. Now, the study did
Speaker 1: not go into whether you should explode the fist at
Speaker 1: that point, if you you should do the peace sign
Speaker 1: and form the snail, or any of the other add
Speaker 1: on bonuses that you may employ in your fist pump. Now,
Speaker 1: I would say that within maybe your social group, your friends,
Speaker 1: your family, you can do some of those variations and
Speaker 1: and risk a little bit more surface contact, right because
Speaker 1: most likely you're going to share some of your microbial
Speaker 1: colony with them. Yes, But outside of that straight on knuckles, Yeah,
Speaker 1: Like with my son, I do the fist pump, but
Speaker 1: then I have it explode and drew Polver's face, So
Speaker 1: so there's a lot of like contact that way. You know.
Speaker 1: I have to say that before you had sent me
Speaker 1: this study. I didn't notice that in school the fist
Speaker 1: bump was being encouraged by by my daughter's teacher. And
Speaker 1: I don't know if that was just my daughter's teacher
Speaker 1: or what, but you know, there's a lot of hacking
Speaker 1: going on, spreading of germs among that group. Well, that's
Speaker 1: interesting that maybe they're encouraging him or the fist bump
Speaker 1: in addition, of course to the Dracula elbow cough, which
Speaker 1: I saw a parent encouraging that on the playground the
Speaker 1: other day and I was like, yes, which is just
Speaker 1: fun to say to a kid anyway, Yeah, Dracula up there,
Speaker 1: drack up. Maybe I don't know better terminology. Alright, So
Speaker 1: envision the future when we have a better understanding of
Speaker 1: the microbiome and uh, the threats, the inherent threats, and
Speaker 1: the beauties that come out of it. Right, we've talked
Speaker 1: about that. Do we just do away altogether with any
Speaker 1: sort of contact? Well, no, not. We don't want to
Speaker 1: do away with with contact. But I mean that's why
Speaker 1: this is beautiful. It's the it's finding and finding out
Speaker 1: what we can lose and uh, and you know how
Speaker 1: we can sort of meet meet people halfway not actually
Speaker 1: see ourselves up in bubbles and refuse to to to
Speaker 1: touch each other. But but also not just just say hey,
Speaker 1: we're not hugging it out, then we're not human. You know.
Speaker 1: I can't remember the exacts of this article that right,
Speaker 1: but there was sort of infestation of this woman and
Speaker 1: her family's house and I don't know if it was
Speaker 1: lies or something, but demons, demons, it was some sort
Speaker 1: of critter. And what happened is that they all sort
Speaker 1: of had to stop hugging. And she said they became
Speaker 1: very adept at doing this sort of smile eyes hug
Speaker 1: and she would stare at her son and sort of
Speaker 1: smile at him and try to hug him with her
Speaker 1: eyes and he would do it back. And she said
Speaker 1: it was really kind of beautiful because they just slowed down,
Speaker 1: and of course they couldn't embrace, but they had that
Speaker 1: sort of communication. Could an air hug like where you
Speaker 1: don't actually touch for you kind of air hug the
Speaker 1: other person kind of, It's just I don't know that's
Speaker 1: in the realm of air guitar playing air sex. That's
Speaker 1: the thing. A thing, all right, Well, there you have it.
Speaker 1: It's kind of a shorty, but it's a shorty that
Speaker 1: might save your life in some small way, and you
Speaker 1: can feel better about fis pumping instead of instead of
Speaker 1: shaking hand instead of high fiving. Uh, And then you
Speaker 1: don't have to feel like you're doing something those those
Speaker 1: too browish if you will. Yeah, it should go out
Speaker 1: of the brow sphere into the mainstream, I think, yeah,
Speaker 1: the brow sphere. Yeah, so hey, let us let us
Speaker 1: know about this. We'd love to hear your thoughts on
Speaker 1: the fist bump versus the handshake, versus bacteria versus hugs.
Speaker 1: Everything in this in this episode is up for grabs,
Speaker 1: including diving down into deep caves for bacterial soldiers that
Speaker 1: we haven't ushered into this war just yet. You can
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